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Gatsby Themes: Watch Us Build a Theme Live

Jason Lengstorf
February 11th, 2019

One of the most exciting things we’re working on at Gatsby right now is themes.

You can find more details in the announcement post and why we think themes are important, but the short version is this:

Gatsby themes allow you to focus only on the parts of the site and app building process that you need to care about by abstracting the rest away into a package.

What this means in practical terms is that you can use Gatsby themes to create a site with:

  • package.json with 4 installed packages (gatsby, react, react-dom, and your theme)
  • gatsby-config.js with metadata and a reference to your theme
  • a folder full of Markdown files for content

And that’s it.

No code. No assembling plugins. Just writing content.

Learn how to build a Gatsby theme.

Recently I had the pleasure of building a theme from scratch with Gatsby’s own John Otander live on my weekly livestream.

On the stream, we covered multiple topics:

  1. How to build a Gatsby theme from scratch
  2. How to create child themes
  3. How to use component shadowing
  4. How to install and use a Gatsby theme

The code we built is available on GitHub — use it as a starting point to build your own Gatsby themes today!

Watch future livestreams

If you’re interested in watching more livestreams, I go live every Thursday at 9am Pacific.

Follow me on Twitch to get notified when I go live.

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Developer. Occasional designer. Process and culture architect. Mediocre bartender. Blogs at lengstorf.com

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